J Mauldin - Final Solution

I shuddered at the thought. “That’s nasty. I mean, I use ’em in my coffee, but still… There’s coffee to cut the taste. By themselves? No thanks.”

“At least they’re sweet. And hey, when you really wanted to be a jerk, you could always swap them for salt tabs.” His passive, persistent grin widened to an epic scale. “They’re the same size, same color!”

“That’s demented, César.”

He let out the fakest evil laugh I’d ever heard. “I know! My brother used to do it to me all the time.”

“You got him back, right?” I reached under my bunk and produced a bottle of water.

“That lazy little shit? Hell yeah. Even though he knew there couldn’t be any danger, I’d come up behind him when passing airlocks, pushing the test cycle button when he wasn’t looking. The door would hiss, an alarm would chirp, and he would have to sprint home to change his pants.”

Water shot out of my mouth and into my hands. The bottle tumbled to the floor and spilled. “You’re awful,” I wheezed, patting my palms dry and leaving a wet smear down the front of my jumpsuit.

“Don’t mess with the bull,” he said, two fingers poking up from the top of his head.

The farther we drifted from the Enceladus colony, falling out of visual range of Saturn, the more nervous I became. We hadn’t lost any extra room to move about or found ourselves any further from rescue than before, but we were now en route, our trajectory fixed. The Vindicator was committed. It made the hull of the ship feel thinner, the weight of vacuum mentally oppressive as the mass of a mountain. I had no interest in seeing my lungs first pass through my sphincter before my brain went dark. Best not to think about it.

We weren’t close enough to the Razor yet to worry about coming under rail gun fire, which had an effective range of millions of miles. The Captain informed us early that morning that the sun’s gravity-well should protect us from danger for a while, two months perhaps. I should have felt relieved that we were safe, but when I checked the water filters in the arboretum, I found that four were broken, beyond economical repair. They weren’t used up or clogged, but crumbled and eroded, almost melted. I’d never seen them break down like this before. A stone came to rest in my stomach.

I tried not to fret. It wasn’t the end of the world. I recorded the damage in our breakdown book and took replacements from storage. The log showed ninety-eight backups on board. They fit into place without much issue and nothing seemed disturbed, the ship’s homeostasis having remained within acceptable levels. Our big ass Coke can was A-OK for now; the void having yet to punch a hole in our side and smoke us like a pinch of dank bud.

“I could use a smoke,” I mumbled, but smoking of any kind, even vaping, was prohibited in all oxygen rich space cans. Go figure. The brass’s engineers didn’t like their warships turning its passengers into charcoal briquettes. Yet, they let us have plasma torches.

Go figure. I’m not sure that made any sense.

I checked off the work order displayed on my tablet and crawled out from behind drooping branches. It was a jungle in here, the perfect habitat for a stalking wild cat.

“What are you doing here?” a female voice growled from a cluster of rustling leaves.

I scrambled to stand back up but fell on my backside, startled at the new arrival, a root digging into my right pocket. On second thought, maybe there were cats in here. “Lib? Is that you?”

“Don’t call me that,” she said, stepping into view. “The name’s Liberty, Master Engineer. But you will address me as Lieutenant Fryatt. Understood?” Her voice was forged poly alloy, light and hard, just like dear old dad.

A grin took hold of my face. “Really? So strict nowadays. You used to love it when I called—”

“Master Engineer,” she raised an outstretched finger just inches from my nose, “address me as Lieutenant Fryatt.”

“Uh, em, yes, sir. Yes, Lieutenant Fryatt.”

“Better. Now I’ll ask you again, enlisted,” her tone softened, “What are you doing here?”

“In the arboretum, ma’am?”

“Don’t be coy, David.”

At the mention of my first name, not just my title, I felt warm. Oh, shit.

“I’ve been stationed on the Vindicator for almost two years, with six months left before being permitted to go home and hang up my tools. The real question is, what are you doing here? I thought you’d decided against military service, and, hello, why didn’t you tell me your father was a captain? I never put the names together until the other day.”

“You would be fool enough not to figure that out on your own.” She chewed on her words for a moment and sat down cross legged, making me feel a little less foolish. “I haven’t seen you in six years. Father took this post eight years back, and after mother died in 2070, I had to get away. Mars just didn’t feel the same. Didn’t matter how nice the Arsia Estates were, they were too empty for me to be alone.”

“Arsia Estates?” I asked, puzzled. I thought Lib was from the bottom levels, like me. “But—”

She sighed, her slack expression reflecting my thoughts. She had guilt over her privilege. Odd. “In a closed colony it’s not a good policy to broadcast you’re from the nicest place in town. Father wanted me to be safe, so he let on in public we were from the middle levels. Guess I found more that interested me down below than up top.” She chuckled and shook her head. “Damn, those were the days.”

The mood between us shifted into something comfortable and familiar. It felt safe to be nostalgic. “They were, weren’t they? Remember back when we used to race skimmers?” I fingered the black rubber gasket on my right ring finger. “Remember this old thing?”

A hearty laugh bubbled out of Lib, making her disciplined veneer turn to dust. She looked somehow younger, her eyes sparkling like stars. The tiny, red, heart-shaped birthmark on the right side of her neck appeared with a sudden rush of blood filling her cheeks. I realized then that was her tell-tale. The birthmark.

“You would keep that,” she said, leaning forward, her face just a couple feet from mine. She rolled her eyes and chuckled. “You were the sentimental type, after all.”

“A flaw to be sure.” I couldn’t stop spinning the gasket around. “Still race skimmers?”

She shrugged. “It’s hard to do way out here, but yeah, I did a couple times before leaving Mars. I can’t believe you wrecked Harrison’s at the foot of the mountains. You almost killed the two of us that day; I mean hell, my environmental suit’s visor even had spider cracks. Clear aluminum, cracked.”

“Yeah, I guess it was a bad idea to steal the very skimmer my boss was fixing for a client right out of his garage when it had a bad actuator. Should have made a better choice.”

“Wasn’t much left of it when you were done. Did you get arrested?”

“Almost.” I gave a nervous chuckle. “But it was fun, right?”

“So fun. God, it was so fun. Were you drunk at the time?”

“Maybe a little buzzed.”

She laughed again, this time having to hold her convulsing stomach. “I sure as hell know I was. That gin Mr. Kensle made, you know, from down below, was strong enough to clean fuel intakes on boosters.” Her laughing subsided as she wiped the joyous moisture from her face.

Those were the best days of my life. Young and carefree, my family strong and healthy, nothing but hopes and dreams laid out before me in an endless parade of delusions. I could have done anything I wanted.